Fast Times at Ridgemont High Page 3

  It was, of course, much too obvious for his considerable pride to admit. But Mr. Hand pursued his students as tirelessly as McGarrett pursued his weekly criminals, with cast-iron emotions and a paucity of words. Substitute truancy for drug traffic, missed tests for robbery, U.S. History for Hawaii, and you had a class with Mr. Hand. Little by little, Mr. Hand’s protean personality had been taken over by McGarrett. He became possessed by “Five-O.” He even got out of his Oldsmobile sedan in the mornings at full stand, whipping his head both ways, like McGarrett.

  “History,” Hand had barked on that first morning, “U.S. or otherwise, has proven one thing to us. Man does not do anything that is not for his own good. It is for your own good that you attend my class. And if you can’t make it . . . I can make you.”

  An impatient knock began at the front door of the bungalow, but Mr. Hand ignored it.

  “There will be tests in this class,” he said immediately. “We have a twenty-question quiz every Friday. It will cover all the material we’ve dealt with during the week. There will be no make-up exams. You can see it’s important that you have your Land of Truth and Liberty textbook by Wednesday at the latest.”

  The knock continued.

  “Your grade in this class is the average of all your quizzes, plus the midterm and final, which counts for one-third.”

  The door knocker now sounded a lazy calypso beat. No one dared mention it.

  “Also. There will be no eating in this class. I want you to get used to doing your business on your time. That’s one demand I make. You do your business on your time, and I do my business on my time. I don’t like staying after class with you on detention. That’s my time. Just like you wouldn’t want me to come to your house some evening and discuss U.S. history with you on your time. Pakalo?”

  Hand finally turned, as if he had just noticed the sound at the door, and began to approach the green metal barrier between him and his mystery truant. Hand opened the door only an inch.

  “Yes?”

  “Yeah,” said the student, a surfer. “I’m registered for this class.”

  “Really?” Hand appeared enthralled.

  “Yeah,” said the student, holding his all-important red add card up to the crack in the door. “This is U.S. History, right? I saw the globe in the window.”

  Jeff Spicoli, a Ridgemont legend since third grade, lounged against the door frame. His long dirty-blond hair was parted exactly in the middle. He spoke thickly, like molasses pouring from a jar. Most every school morning Spicoli awoke before dawn, smoked three bowls of marijuana from a small steel bong, put on his wet suit, and surfed before school. He was never at school on Fridays, and on Mondays only when he could handle it. He leaned a little into the room, red eyes glistening. His long hair was still wet, dampening the back of his white peasant shirt.

  “May I come in?”

  “Oh, please,” replied Hand. “I get so lonely when that third attendance bell rings and I don’t see all my kids here.”

  The surfer laughed—he was the only one—and handed over his red add card. “Sorry I’m late. This new schedule is totally confusing.”

  Hand read the card aloud with utter fascination in his voice. “Mr. Spicoli?”

  “Yes, sir. That’s the name they gave me.”

  Mr. Hand slowly tore the red add card into little pieces, effectively destroying the very existence of Jeffrey Spicoli, fifteen, in the Redondo school system. Mr. Hand sprinkled the little pieces over his wastebasket.

  Spicoli stood there, frozen in the process of removing his backpack. “You just ripped up my card,” he said with disbelief. “What’s your problem?”

  Mr. Hand moved to within several inches of Spicoli’s face. “No problem,” he said breezily. “I think you know where the front office is.”

  It took a moment for the words to work then way out of Jeff Spicoli’s mouth.

  “You dick.”

  Mr. Hand cocked his head. He appeared poised on the edge of incredible violence. There was a sudden silence while the class wondered exactly what he might do to the surfer. Deck him? Throw him out of Ridgemont? Shoot him at sunrise?

  But Mr. Hand simply turned away from Jeff Spicoli as if the kid had just ceased to exist. Small potatoes. Hand simply continued with his first-day lecture.

  “I’ve taken the trouble,” he said, “to print up a complete schedule of class quizzes and the chapters they cover. Please pass them to all the desks behind you.”

  Spicoli remained at the front of the class, his face flushed, still trying to sort out what had happened. Hand coolly counted out stacks of his purple mimeographed assignment sheets. After a time, Spicoli fished a few bits of his red add card out of the wastebasket and huffed out of the room.

  Hand had made his entrance, just as Brad said he would. But the strange saga of Mr. Hand wasn’t the only item Brad Hamilton handed down to his sister. He had also passed her a fairly complete set of Mr. Hand’s weekly quizzes. Hand did not change them from year to year, a well-known fact that rendered him harmlessly entertaining.

  “So,” said Hand just before the last bell, “let’s recap. First test on Friday. Be there. Aloha.”

  Linda Barrett

  Stacy Hamilton’s second-period class was Beginning Journalism/School Newspaper, the only class she would share this year with her friend Linda Barrett. Ridgemont High prided itself in a strong and sophisticated school newspaper. The Ridgemont Reader covered world and school news alike, all in six pages. It was infrequent that an underclassman like Stacy was allowed to join the staff, but Linda Barrett had arranged that, too.

  The teacher was a young woman in her early thirties, a slightly frazzled-looking brunette who wore her hair in a short ponytail. Her name was Mrs. Sheehan, but most of her returning students called her Rita. On the first day of class, Mrs. Sheehan was seated at one of the beige plastic desks arranged in a semicircle around her classroom. At the front of the room, sitting on Mrs. Sheehan’s desk and kicking her legs rhythmically against the front panel, was Angie Parisi, the student editor of the Ridgemont Reader. She wore a tight Black Sabbath t-shirt.

  “Okay,” said Angie, “does everybody have their assignments for the first issue?”

  A beefy kid in a red-and-yellow letterman’s jacket spoke louder than the others. “When do I have to have my column in?”

  Angie cast a wicked sidelong glance at the rest of the class. “How about Friday afternoon? Like everybody else, William.”

  “But football is this Friday, and I want to include some observations about the first football game. You know?”

  Groans.

  “Be grateful you have the column at all, William.”

  The remark seemed to roll right off William. You got the feeling he was used to it.

  “Okay,” continued Angie, “where is Alan Davidson?”

  “Here.” He was short, and wore an oversized blue down vest, winter and summer.

  “Alan, how is that piece coming on angel dust smokers out on Luna Street?”

  “They don’t talk much. I ask them questions and they just kind of look at me . . .”

  The class was disrupted by the arrival of Linda Barrett. Late, as always, she bustled through the door of journalism class carrying an armload of books. She headed straight for the empty seat beside Stacy Hamilton, and plopped her cargo on the desk. Everything stopped in journalism class—Linda was wearing tight jeans and a filmy blue blouse with three buttons undone.

  “Well,” she said in a sparkling voice, “do you want to hear my excuse now or later, Rita?”

  Mrs. Sheehan watched her with tired eyes, even on this first day. This was her third year with Linda Barrett.

  “Please try and be on time, Linda.”

  “But my locker broke, Mrs. Sheehan!”

  “Just try and be on time, Linda.”

  “I’m sorry, Rita.”

  The class resumed.

  Linda leaned over and punched Stacy’s arm. They had not seen each other yet this m
orning, and they hadn’t talked since the phone call at 3 A.M. “God, you look so good,” she whispered. “Where did it happen?”

  Stacy smiled.

  “Where?”

  “The baseball field.”

  “The baseball field?”

  “Well, not really the baseball field. The dugout.”

  “The dugout?”

  “Well, where else do you go?”

  Linda punched Stacy’s arm again. “I don’t believe you. Is this serious?”

  “Come on,” Stacy cracked. “It’s just sex.”

  They both laughed, and Linda feigned great shock at her younger friend’s use of one of Linda’s favorite lines.

  Somehow all roads at Ridgemont High led to Linda Barrett. Everyone knew her. She left an indelible mark on most students who came in contact with her. She was chronically exuberant, usually in a relentlessly good mood. She knew how to dress, and she knew how to walk.

  Even as far back as grade school, other girls came to Linda Barrett for counseling. Her mother was a nurse at University Hospital, and somehow Linda knew all the facts of life before any other kid her age in Ridgemont.

  Linda’s view of sex was, basically, that everyone had blown it way out of proportion. “A lot of girls use sex,” she had told Stacy Hamilton long ago. “They use sex to get a guy closer. To really nail him down or something. To say ‘I had sex with you, you owe me something.’ Well, that’s terrible. They’re not having sex to have sex. They’re having sex to use it as something. I’d hate myself if I did that.”

  No question about it. Linda Barrett was an authority. While the other girls were just abandoning their tricycles, Linda was underlining and memorizing all the sex scenes from Shogun. Some had Seventeen magazine in their lockers; she had The Hite Report.

  Linda and Stacy had been sitting at a bus stop the winter before, when Stacy turned to Linda. “Linda,” she asked, “will you help me get birth control pills?”

  Linda, then sixteen, turned all pro. “We’ll go down to the clinic and get them tomorrow.”

  “You just go down there?”

  “Yeah. They give them to you free. But you’ve got to need them first.”

  “Linda,” Stacy had said with determination, “I’m getting ready to need them.”

  The next day they ditched third period and took a bus to the downtown free clinic. They were too late for the noon session, so they walked around downtown for an hour. The two girls looked so young, not even the sailors bothered them.

  “When you get in there,” Linda had advised, “you tell them that you have sex twice a week.”

  Stacy nodded.

  “If you tell them the truth, they won’t give you the right pills. They’ll try to talk you into a diaphragm or something, and that might really hurt. You’ve got to hold out for the pills.”

  It took forever. The free clinic, Stacy thought at the time, was like anything else—they made you wait a long time for what you really wanted. First, three nurses led the group of girls into a high-ceilinged “rap room,” public service jargon for a room with bean bags instead of chairs, and proceeded with a half-hour presentation of Responsibilities of Sex. They used the same diagrams Stacy had seen in eighth- and ninth-grade sex-education classes. Then, finally, each girl waited for a private examination and prescription from one of the free clinic doctors.

  When Stacy Hamilton finally reached her examination room, a nurse sat her on a steel table and asked her to wait a moment for a Dr. Betkin. Fifteen minutes later Dr. Betkin breezed into the room.

  “Good afternoon.”

  “Good afternoon.”

  He gave Stacy the once-over. “You look a little young. Why are you here?”

  Stacy responded with all the spontaneity of a war prisoner under interrogation. “I have sex twice a week.”

  “Twice a week? How old are you?”

  “Fifteen.”

  The doctor nodded once. He took out a pad. “Uh-huh. Well, I’m going to start you on Norinyl 1 Plus 50s. I’m giving you three months’ worth. Now what I want you to do is please, and this is very important, wait thirty days before you have sex again. Okay? That’s not impossible, is it?”

  “No. Thank you, doctor.”

  Dr. Betkin paused before he left the room. “Are you a virgin?”

  Stacy almost admitted it. “Sort of.”

  Dr. Betkin nodded and left the room.

  On the way out of the free clinic, Linda and Stacy passed a donation box.

  “Do you have any change?”

  “No,” said Linda, “we’ll get it next time.”

  Linda and Stacy hadn’t been friends in junior high. Stacy was in sixth grade and worked in the attendance office. Linda was a haughty eighth grader who hadn’t had time for the likes of Stacy.

  Linda Barrett always had a score of boyfriends. She acted as if she didn’t know why, which only compounded the jealousy of girls like Stacy. Linda was the first girl at Paul Revere Junior High to get tits. Large, full-grown breasts. Even at twelve, she would pull a sweater over her head like she was Ursula Andress.

  Linda began dressing out of Vogue, wearing stylish raincoats on sunny days. She developed a distaste for males in the same age group. Linda went out with high school boys then, and she logged long nights out in the parking lot of Town Center Mall. One of her boyfriends turned her on to smoking pot, and Linda pursued it with her typical uninhibited zeal. She began buying and selling whole kilos out of her room. Then she added speed and coke to the trade. The only drugs Linda Barrett, then thirteen, never sold were heroin and LSD.

  But it was not as if her activities as a junior high drug kingpin suddenly changed Linda. She was the same freckle-faced Linda. There was just no way she was ever going to save up for her dream car—a red Chevy Ranchero—with household chore money. No way could she buy make-up, food, clothes, and records . . . forget about records. Everything was too expensive. So she sold dope. And she went out with high school boys who paid for everything.

  One Saturday night Linda and a gang of Ridgemont High boys planned a visit to the Regal Theatre to see a midnight showing of Jimi Plays Berkeley, the famous Hendrix concert movie. Linda sneaked out of her house and met the boys in the alley behind the Ridgemont Bowl.

  Standing in the alley, Linda and the three boys smoked some hash and drank a little tequila from the bottle. A kid named Gary drove to the Regal. They all bought tickets and went inside.

  Five minutes into Jimi Hendrix’s first guitar solo of the film, two of Linda’s friends let loose with bloodcurdling war cries. “AAAAHHH-WOOOOOOOOO!!!!! RIGHTEOUS!!!!!”

  As their howls continued, paper cups and boxes began to fly at them from all sections of the theatre. Someone threw a bottle. A scuffle broke out around Linda and her friends. They were all kicked out of the Regal.

  At ten minutes after twelve there was not much to do around Ridgemont. The kids sat in Gary’s car in the parking lot, and Linda plucked from her purse some finely ground speed. She laid out four lines on a pocket mirror, and each of them snorted it through a Carl’s Jr. straw. Then they finished off the rest of the tequila. It was quite a car party.

  Someone got the idea to return to the Town Center Mall parking lot, and Gary fired up the car. Halfway back to the mall, Linda Barrett tapped on Gary’s shoulder. Her voice was soft, shaking. “I think I’m going to get sick.”

  “Open the window! Stick your head out and you’ll feel . . .”

  Linda had the window down halfway when it hit. It was the most ungracious thing she had ever done. She vomited down the inside of the door of Gary’s car.

  “GODDAMN IT!” shouted Gary. “This is gonna stink for days!”

  One of the other boys came to Linda’s defense. “Just shut up, asshole, and pull into a gas station. We’ll clean it up.”

  “What am I running here,” said Gary. “A Barf Mobile?”

  “Just pull into this Arco.”

  Through it all, Linda stayed in the back with her head on the side
armrest.

  Gary and his Ridgemont High buddies were just driving into Town Center Mall when they noticed Linda wasn’t speaking any more. She wasn’t making any sound at all.

  They tried to slap her awake, and when that didn’t work the boys started to panic. They tried discreetly walking her around the mall parking lot. They tried cold water on her face. They pressed the nerve in her shoulder. Nothing. Then Linda’s high school friends arrived at their solution. They propped Linda up against a closed jeans store and called Town Center Mall Security, just before tearing ass out of there.

  The mall security force referred the call to the Ridgemont Police Department, and when the police arrived, the first thing they did was search Linda Barrett’s purse. The Ridgemont police then called Mr. and Mrs. Barrett at two in the morning and informed them that their daughter was not safely asleep down the hall, but instead on her way to University Hospital to have her stomach pumped, with a charge of amphetamines, crystallized speed, and marijuana possession.

  Linda Barrett awoke to a scene out of TV drama. Mrs. Barrett was standing over her daughter’s bed, screaming at the ceiling as if it were the heavens.

  “Where did I go wrong? Oh, GOD IN HEAVEN, where did I go wrong with this child?”

  Linda looked up feebly. Her first words were, “I don’t know why they pumped my stomach. I already threw up everything.”

  Her mother fell silent for a moment. Then she started screaming at the ceiling again. “DEAR JESUS IN HEAVEN . . .”

  Linda Barrett told the complete story to her parents. It had happened for the best, she told them. Now she knew how immature boys were, and how immature she had been. Linda took all the blame herself and promised to change.

  Amazingly enough, she did.

  Linda set about courting the straightest girl she knew, Stacy Hamilton. Stacy, who lived in the same condominium complex, worked in the attendance office of Paul Revere. Linda began dropping by, making conversation. She called Stacy constantly. She wrote Stacy notes. She sat next to her at lunch. And slowly, very slowly, Stacy Hamilton, a somewhat plump and prudish young honor student, came to view Linda Barrett as a friend.